Norwegian government backs down over memorial to Breivik victims

[Eugene]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Norwegian government backs down over memorial to Breivik victims

AFP in Oslo
Wednesday 21 June 2017 18.10 BST

Norway’s government has said that a controversial memorial to the victims of Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 massacre would be rethought in order to avoid an embarrassing lawsuit by local residents who do not want it to go ahead.

The planned memorial, entitled Memory Wound, would have involved a wide slit cut into a strip of land near the island of Utøya where most of Breivik’s 77 victims were killed.

The project was generally approved of aesthetically, but about 20 locals, some of whom helped save lives during the massacre, sued the state to block the project, arguing it would harm the local community and landscape. They saw the planned memorial as too invasive and too close to their homes.

In order to appease critics, Norway’s minister of communal affairs and modernisation, Jan Tore Sanner, said on Wednesday that the project would be abandoned and another as-yet-undecided memorial would be raised on the dock where the ferry to Utøya departs.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/21/norwegian-government-backs-down-over-memorial-to-breivik-victims

[ck4829]

1. A memorial to the victims of one of the first alt-righters, it won't be the last

But hopefully there won't be too many of them.